Other than being the daughter of Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash is best known nowadays for a conversation she had one day at eighteen on a tour bus with her famous father. They were talking about music, and when Johnny Cash found that his daughter knew few of the songs that to him were second nature and thereby central to her musical heritage, he sat down with a legal pad and wrote out a list of one hundred essential country songs, handed it to her and told her that it was her education. Forty-five years later, she is still going strong and doing justice to her inheritance.
It was just her and her husband John Levanthal at Redding, CA’s Cascade Theater last Thursday evening, and while it would have been nice to see her belt out songs with a full band, the more intimate setting allowed for Levanthal to display his virtuoso guitar mastery, usually in extended introductions to the songs, and for Cash to explore the emotional depth of the introspective songs that make up her current album, She Remembers Everything. You could easily assume from seeing and hearing her onstage to be two decades younger than her current sixty-three years, and it was almost as much of a treat to hear her talk as to sing, as she introduced several songs with a down-home lyricism that was pleasantly hypnotic. Most of her two sets consisted of songs from her current album and two others: The River and The Thread, and The List, the latter being a collection from the hundred songs written down by her father. She closed out the evening with Seven Year Ache, her first big hit from the ’80s, and Five Hundred Miles.
As I had been led to anticipate by a friend who had seen one of her earlier shows, the audience, including myself for full disclosure’s sake, tended to be something of a mature crowd. It was also a crowd that responded most to the traditional songs in her repertoire, and when she would do one, such as Long Black Veil, people in the seats around me would sing along to the lyrics. It was a pleasure to be part of an audience that knew Cash and her music as well as they did, but it was also a little disheartening that few younger fans were there to share in the experience. As she and her father intended, this is music that transcends generations, and those who weren’t in attendance don’t know what they’re missing.
– Chuck Strom
